Some of you may have heard about or even played the original games in the Langrisser franchise, hence this online version will be no doubt an exciting title to look forward to. Developed by Gamania and revealed way back in 2010 (link), it has been 2 years since and oddly, the game launched its Alpha phase with exclusive accounts in China first, despite the voice-overs being all in Japanese. Well, I ain’t complaining, and note that this is just an early look at the Alpha phase.
Customization is pretty limited, but that said I expect more choices as the client gets an upgrade to launch status. Similar to a group of roleplaying video games out there, there are a number of questions which players must answer before being assigned a character class.
There are 6 in total, and I am sure someone more hardworking than me will be posting up the different combinations in no time. You can see that there are many other advancements for either of the 6 paths/ classes, which makes the game even more intriguing. The last time I saw such a deep class tree was in Luna Online, and Dragon Nest to a certain extent.
Town
The Dark force town is pretty… Well, gloomy. There is nothing really exciting about here, maybe except it screams “boring” in a pretty loud way and is kind of just a circular cathedral or a plaza. I only have negative comments for this part, hopefully it will be extended in terms of size or at least more textures will be added to the various structures.
Combat
Langrisser Schwarz is an instanced dungeon-based MMO, much like Dragon Nest. Each class will have their own unique mercenaries, new ones which can be bought. I am not sure if they can be captured though, but it will be fun to do so (I am a Pokemon fan). In combat, players can choose to put them in 1 of the 3 modes, either defensive, passive or attacking. Defensive will be the best choice, since passive means they do nothing while attacking means they will just hit and aggro the first enemies within range.
Spacebar here equates to normal attack (no jumping in this game), which is kind of frustrating when hitting enemies. As you see, I was using skills most of the time. The camera did no help as well, especially when I was near the side terrains. The camera angle in combat needs to be fixed, or it will just frustrated even more players.
Once again, this is just the Alpha phase of the game, a very early build which will be far from the release state. I was looking forward to an open world, but I guess there will not be enough mobs for everyone since each character is basically controlling a small army. With that said, the earlier trailer release by Gamania, seen below, shows much more information if you have not read about the game.
